Free Trade Isn't Fair

As Dolan says, he "never looked back." After working briefly in the early 1990s as a field director for the California Democratic Party and then for Rock the Vote, which registered millions of young voters for the 1992 presidential campaign, he moved on to Global Trade Watch in 1995, where he has been on the front lines of almost every major trade battle. Although globalization foes lost the original NAFTA debate, Dolan helped organize the campaign that later frustrated the Clinton administration's attempts to expand that agreement to South America. He also helped shut down a new round of negotiations over the Multilateral Agreement on Investment in 1997. During the next two years, he was instrumental in the ultimately successful fight in Congress to defeat the fast-track trade-negotiation authority sought by Clinton, which would have cut Congress out of its constitutionally mandated role of regulating international commerce. And in 1999, there was Seattle, where Dolan was widely recognized as the single most effective organizer of the massive WTO protests. He sat out the demonstrations against both the World Bank and the IMF this past April because he was working -- unsuccessfully, as it turned out -- to defeat the vote on normalizing trade relations with China. Undaunted, he was back on the front lines in August, organizing fair-trade protests at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.

How does Dolan manage to do so much so fast? The Web is an important tool in his arsenal. "The Internet has been a big help," says Dolan, whose email inbox on any given day may contain more than 2,500 messages from people across the country, as well as from international contacts. "We wouldn't have been able to house all the people that we housed in Seattle, a couple of thousand of them, without a Web site. We wouldn't have been able to collect the numbers of people that we knew were coming to Seattle if it weren't for the email reporting. It wouldn't have been as big as it was without the Internet."

But there's definitely a limit to what the Internet can do, says Dolan. "It's necessary but not sufficient for the maintenance, care, and feeding of this movement," he says. "It's necessary to keep the data moving, but it's not sufficient because you can't trust people making commitments over email. It's like: I'm home alone at night, I'm an activist, I care about these issues, I'm reading my email, and somebody asks me for something. I'm having a beer before bed, and I type in -- it's easy -- and I say, 'I can do that.' And then I forget about it completely the next morning. And it doesn't get done. There's no follow-up, no accountability. It isn't real organizing. I believe in face time, meetings, people taking responsibility, and the appropriate follow-through. A high degree of accountability and clear lines of reporting and responsibility -- that's my organizing model."

Free Trade, Open Minds

Much of Mike Dolan's work involves tactics -- coordinating messages with a diverse group of constituencies, planning rallies, meetings, and seminars. But the movement itself begins with an agenda -- one that is deeply at odds with virtually every piece of conventional wisdom about the value of global economic integration. The arguments in defense of free trade have become familiar to anyone who has even a passing interest in politics and business. Free trade makes it easy for companies to manufacture whatever products they want to, wherever they prefer to make them -- therefore it is good for everyone. It provides cheaper products for consumers in developed countries and creates jobs for Third World workers. Free trade is good for democracy too. The quickest route to fair elections, free-traders say, is open markets. Free trade is modern, progressive, futuristic -- a welcome antidote to old-fashioned (and dangerous) nationalist passions. And (here's the clincher) free trade is inevitable: How can you erect barriers to the movement of factories, goods, and money in a world where ideas and information travel over the Internet at the speed of light?

Mike Dolan has heard all of the arguments, and he disagrees with every one of them. Globalization "is a new colonialism," he says. A slightly rumpled, bespectacled man, Dolan, in his button-down shirt, khaki pants, and white sneakers, looks (and sounds) a bit like a rogue professor. "A hundred years ago, it was the British Empire or Portugal or France or Spain who were exploiting the natural and human resources of what we now call the 'Third World,' " he says. "It's not countries anymore. It's big corporations that are doing the same thing in the name of this so-called free trade, which is, in fact, corporate-managed trade."

The case against globalization, which Dolan makes over and over again as he crisscrosses the country talking to grassroots groups, takes all of the free-trade arguments and turns them on their head.